“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” [Jeremiah 17:9]
The attached article mentions a flyer that claims Satanism to be a “nontheistic” religion having no belief in God or the devil, which is technically an oxymoron [deception] because you can’t – by definition – have a “religion” and be an atheist at the same time.
Religion involves paying homage to the divine, which can’t happen if you don’t believe there’s such a thing!
Merriam-Webster tells us that being religious means:
“Relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity.”
Jeremiah’s quote refers to the “heart,” which we need to understand as being the same as, or I should say, to “include” the mind.
Neither the heart nor the mind are objective “things,” of course, ie., static objects inside our heads.
They’re simply human words attempting to describe the dynamic, inner life of human beings; a life spiritual and invisible.
We tend to forget, however, that these words only create images and concepts in our minds. Nothing more!
Our very limited, often “myopic” powers of both attention and understanding tends to obscure for us (meaning our much-fuller, operating “awareness” of things generally, not just “knowledge” of something in particular) TRUTH concerning the infinite depth and richness of our interior spiritual life stretching fourth endlessly, aching for the divine, and eternity.
When we use words that create static pictures in our mind, the danger is that we then invest too much meaning in what we’re looking at Inside our heads.
We falsely equate those pictures with what they attempt to signify, but being limited, fragmented and incomplete, they will by no means signify the whole or entire picture.
If we think that it is case, then we distort our understanding that we are broken inside (spiritually-speaking) human beings.
We tend to overlook the essential “dynamic” reality that is the true mark of our interior, spiritual lives. We do that by equating far more to what we imagine than we should, often concluding that our imaginings are the same as reality itself, a process sociologists refer to as “reification,” which is, more precisely, thinking that what you think is reality and not just a partial, and perhaps even false, mental perspective on that reality we generate in our imagination.
Freudian Psychology encourages us to think, for example, of our interior life as a static or “fixed” picture in the mind, as we would imagine a house: the Id is the basement, the ego is the main floor, and the superego is the attic.
Sounds like a smart framework for understanding our human nature, but it’s not! It’s both a distortion and a deception, blocking us from seeing the full truth of the simplicity and unity of our interior spiritual life as a result of the use of far too many “human mind” words in place of those revealed from the Mind of God.
Such artificial human mental constructions take our attention away from the fact that our inner life is constantly changing, dynamic, alive, and governed by our “attention” and free will….not things hidden in the basement that we can’t see and have to go pay big bucks to a Psychiatrist to dig up for us!
There are many different variations of the word “mind” in Greek. Like Satanists, they too were big fans of their own thinking!
There is, however, no word or concept for the Greek’s pagan view and understanding of mind to be found in Hebrew scripture. In fact, there’s no word for “mind” in the Old Testament at all, but they have lots of words for heart, most of which are synonymous in meaning with “understanding” within their unified world view where living in God’s Spirit is life and living outside that Spirit and Will is death.
The lowest degree of understanding In the Old Testament, more human, less divine is “Bin”, then “Binah”… right up a ladder of understanding that has lots of rungs to the rare use of the word “Tebunah,” denoting the kind of “heart” that King David and Solomon had… understanding powerful enough to lead and give good counsel with the very “heart of God”.
When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, the essential “unity of the inner life” at the very heart of the Hebrew world-view denoted with the use of these powerful, beautiful words for “heart” was lost.
That essential unity of the person we find at the heart of Hebrew Anthropology was completely swallowed up by pagan culture when the word “heart” was distorted by translation and rendered into a myriad of Greek words for “thinking”.
This created the illusion that we have a fragmented, complicated interior life, by using SO MANY different words when speaking of different states, powers and capacities of our human nature.
With the word “heart” always translated into one of those fancy, long Greek words meaning thinking only or “mind,” the entire process of language assimilation in the inculturation process denigrated the power, and distorted the meaning of the word “heart,” as it’s meaning became such as to consider our interior life exclusively as different modes of “thinking.”
That fragmentation continues to this day in our culture.
For example, we say, you ‘think’ with your mind and you ‘love’ with your heart.
In Hebrew, “you think with your heart” and you “love with your heart”.
Thinking is not the only (or even the most important) thing that the heart/mind/….WE…can do!
So when Jeremiah tells us that the human “heart” is sick, read (and understand) that he’s also saying the human “mind” is sick, and he’s not just talking about our “brains”! He’s talking about the entire person.
No one in their “right mind” would worship their own limited, sick, sinful mind would they?
That is, unless they were indeed deceived about the true nature of their own mind, which Satanists are!
This “championing” of the human mind” is indeed demonic, therefore, the very OPPOSITE of “paying homage to God”… true religion.
Ironically, by saying they don’t believe in Satan and don’t therefore pay homage to him, but only to the “human mind,” they are obviously unwittingly (and perhaps unknowingly) doing the very thing they are saying they are not doing!
That’s how deception works!
Satanism: The most selfish, irrational, ridiculous, retarded philosophy (not religion) in the history of philosophy. If it is what they say it is, it should never been recognized as a religion by the United States government!
We only have to open our eyes a bit to see that virtually everything humans have done (accomplished with their giant brains/minds) has crashed and burned!
Our supreme intelligence has transformed a pristine beautiful world into a dystopian nightmare, having destroyed, poisoned and sickened not only ourselves, but the wondrous world in which we live.
Like a spreading virus, we’ve sickened others and ourselves and the entire world with our sick minds.
No one in their right mind can look at the accomplishments of the human species at any point in its history, or “cumulatively,” and honestly say that we should worship our own mind, or that it should become in any way the object of adoration or glorification!
Shame perhaps, definitely not adoration.
The malicious machinations of the human mind have caused untold suffering and death in the world for as long as history has been recorded.
Part of that “sickness” of the heart that Jeremiah references is that we will NOT consider the moral landscape of our own mind – our “mindscape” [the full scope and horizon of what we see can see with our minds-eye].
We are inclined to only look at all the good stuff we do with our minds, the wow, wow, wow scientific advancements that make our jaws drop!
Focusing only on intelligence and advancements with science creates the illusion the thing defining us is our creative thinking.
We all intuitively know that the most defining feature of human beings is morality: are we moral or immoral, good or bad, kind or unkind, would we rescue or kill?
The moral contours of our mindscape are the core dimension of our human nature that has sadly not been advancing like our knowledge!
We are going the other way, to hell in a hand basket, now with sophisticated GPS of course!
Anyone who would take their children to an after school Satanist Club is truly out of their mind, they’re TRUE mind, the one that makes them their “true self,” which is a self that was created by a loving Creator, our Father in heaven.
But here’s the million dollar question:
“What’s our ‘right mind’ to be?”
Our “right mind,” our correct posture before reality and before our self-reflective “sense-of-self,” should be nothing less than the very Mind that God!
That would be the mind put in us when we were created in and for Christ, the one that got corrupted by sin, and was then only made restorable through Jesus, but not only restored to innocence, but lifted up to participate in the very Spirit and life of God made possible by the agonizing passion and death of Jesus dying on a cross for us.
If we want to have “right thinking,” we therefore need to put on the mind of Christ, within which is the heart of God, NOT worship our own worldly wits and wonky wisdom!
Doing that is the way we deceive ourselves and worship Satan while thinking he doesn’t exist, as evident in the attached.
To understand what true religion is, we must look to Jesus, who always did the Will of his Father, which is the way we also must honour God.
“Let the same MIND be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:5-11).
That’s the mind St Paul tells us we need to have directing our thinking, yes, but ALSO everything else as well, all the important stuff, like how we treat other people, whether we are humble and meek like Jesus, the model for true religion, or full of arrogance and pride justifying taking our children to clubs with monsters on thrones with horns.
Come to think of it, why is the demon Baphomet sitting on a throne with a little boy and a little girl looking up adoringly?
Oh yeah, I remember now!
They’re coming for our children.